Kingdom of Cages(71)

“Definitely got to get you one of these,” said Chena when Sadia handed the bottle back. “You going to tell me what’s going on, or do I just have to send you home?”

Sadia stared at the ground for a moment, as if she were making a hard decision. Chena bit her lip, waiting to see which way that decision would go.

“After Mom… left, my dad decided he was going to get us out of the dorms,” she whispered harshly.

“He came to Stem to see the draft.” She nodded her head toward the library, the screen sheet, and the crowd. Then she caught the look on Chena’s face. “You’ve never seen a draft?” Chena shook her head. “It’s when the hothouse is out of samples and they’re looking for something special.” She drew out the last word as if it were something obscene. “If you’ve got the right kind of genes and they’re expressed the right way, the hothouse will pay you to come live with them and give samples and get experimented on.”

Or have a baby for them. Chena’s stomach turned over, but she tried to keep her face still. It didn’t matter. Sadia wasn’t looking at her anyway. “If you don’t have the right setup and you want to try anyway, you can go to a tailor and pay to get fixed up.”

“But”—Chena’s forehead wrinkled—“you can’t engineer adults. You can only do babies.” The genetic patterns of adults were too set, too slow. You needed a baby or, even better, a fetus that was still developing, so you would have the largest possible number of easily accessible undifferentiated cells to work with.

The corner of Sadia’s mouth twitched. “You can sort of do adults. You can monkey with their… things… stem cells. Or if they have a cancer, you can play with that. It’s got to do with what the cells are doing and what they’ve turned in to, and stuff like that.” Sadia’s fingers knotted around each other. “Dad was close to what the hothouse needed, but not close enough, so he paid a tailor to open his genes up the rest of the way, and the tailor did, and Dad disappeared.”

“What do you mean?”

Sadia looked at her like she was crazed or stupid. “I mean he disappeared. The hothouse took him and they never gave him back. They never sent the money, nothing. We don’t know where he is. I thought… I thought…” She pressed her mouth shut.

Chena sat back. She knew what Sadia thought. When Sadia saw the tailor, she thought she could make him tell her where her dad had gone to.

“And you’re sure that was the guy?”

Sadia nodded miserably. “Remember I told you he brought us here before? I remember him talking to that guy. I remember those hands.”

That memory had almost gotten them in trouble too. Almost screwed everything to the deck and then blown it all apart.

But Chena couldn’t blame her for one slow second.

She also couldn’t do piss-all for her. So she just tucked the towel away and said, “Come on, let’s get going.”

Sadia nodded again and wiped at her face once more. They both scrambled to their feet, dusting themselves off automatically and avoiding each other’s gazes. When Chena finally glanced at her again, she thought she saw gratitude in Sadia’s eyes.

They started in on their rounds. Chena was careful to introduce Sadia to all of the customers, even though there weren’t many today. Most of the messages that had to go to the market, though, did have replies. She decided to let Sadia wait for those. Chena left Sadia at the tents with money to buy some winter clothes, a water bottle, and lunch, while she went around to some of the houses to finish up the deliveries.

She was coming out of Sri Soja’s cramped little house way back in the dunes with a plea for Nan Elle when she saw the tailor lingering on the boardwalk, fingering his chin with his long hand. One of his fingers had been splinted and bandaged. She hesitated when she saw him, and he spotted her. Chena pulled herself together and walked away in the other direction.

After a moment, she heard footsteps behind her. Chena kept her eyes straight ahead. The footsteps got closer.

“Piss off,” she muttered under her breath, and picked up her pace.

The footsteps also picked up their pace. After a couple seconds of this, she heard him wheezing, and then the tailor said, “If you keep this up I may decide it’s not worth it.”

Chena stopped abruptly and turned on her heel. “What do I care?”

“I don’t know,” he said, his mouth just beginning to spread out to the grin she had seen earlier. “It depends on how much you want a hundred positives.”

A hundred? Chena clamped her jaw shut. Otherwise it would have dropped open and made her look stupid. “Whatever you want carried, it must be heavy.”